I use Fastmail for my email, and I'm very happy with them. They recently updated their anti-spam filters with a new Bayesian one. It was catching virtually all of the roughly 125 or so spam I was getting each day.

I've noticed over the past few days that most of the spam that gets through is using the same trick. The message includes a paragraph of randomly selected real English words. Those "non-spam" words must be given enough credit in the message to overcome the normal spaminess. My lastest spam used this list:

You could detect that the words were not in a sentence by checking frequencies of pairs of words. However, it seems pretty clear that the next step will be to randomly select sentences or paragraphs from Public Domain books. How the heck are we going to detect that? They can make this section arbitrarily large, to improve their ratings. I bet that spam of the future will be a unique combination of penis enlargement and classic literature.

There is a new largest known prime number. It is the 40th Mersenne prime to be found, which are of the form 2^n -1, with n prime. The largest known primes are usually of this form. In this case it is 2^20996011 - 1.

Update: As of September 4, 2006, the 44th Mersenne prime was found, 232,582,657-1.

I've just had 3 seconds of fame... I was on Fox 25 News at 10 in Boston. Years of preparation and keeping up on current events paid off. Coming out of the drug store this afternoon the anchor was there with a camera guy. My big question ... did I know the security features on the new $20 bill? I rattled off a couple.. the iridescent ink, the little yellow 20's in the background on the back. I can at least be happy that I was the only person on the street that knew any. Quite a moment of glory.

My previous claim to fame was riding in the trunk of an elephant at the Hong Kong zoo at age 5. (I was the only blonde kid there.) Unfortunately, the TV news was after my bedtime, and they hadn't invented VCR's yet, so I never got to see that one. I now have my big 3 second on TiVo, so I can watch it anytime :-). I never knew I moved my head so much when I talk..